“Geminids” by Andrea Cavedo
"...she knows somewhere there is also the hot tub, which Blake calls a spa bath. The only other thing she knows about the house is that somewhere within it is a nude photograph of Blake’s mother."
There’s a name for the kind of nostalgia that comes with enjoying memories of the past without wanting to relive them: reflective nostalgia. I can’t think of a better way to describe this story than that specific feeling. I was wrapped up in memory from the opening, with the reworking of a children’s rhyme and that anticipation waiting for permission from parents. There are rich details that ground this story in such a specific era and also time in youth, CD-ROM encyclopedias and the thrill of crushes and the anxiety of making curfews and that plaid bedding that all teenage boys seemed to have. What a vivid and loving snapshot!
Of course, adolescence also comes with an awful lot of awkwardness and disappointment. I’ll let you go on that journey with the hapless and occasionally oblivious Maisie, let you enjoy your own little connections to a past you may appreciate without wanting to live again.
—Jessica Dawn
Assistant Editor, Short Story, Long
“Geminids”
She told her parents where she’s going, of course she did. She is a good girl, so the way she told them was by asking them permission, rather than coming out with it directly. She saw her mother’s face go quite still and her father’s hands work against his placemat. He flattened his palms, then tented them together, then half-folded, half-pointed his fingers, then tented them again. Here is the church, here is the steeple, here is the church. The doors do not open. The people remain hidden.
“It’s a meteor shower, the big winter meteor shower. You know we can never see the stars well here in town. There isn’t as much light pollution where Blake—where Blake’s family lives, so the view is better,” she said.
She is good at making persuasive arguments, or so her English teachers have always claimed. She is regularly praised in red ink for her authority and maturity. She used that authority as a mask of confidence with her parents, since she herself only heard of these meteors, these Geminids, that very afternoon during lunch over the cafeteria’s molded plastic trays, the rotini with marinara and hot rolls with a palette knife-smear of butter the lunch ladies assume you want, even if you don’t ask for it. Even if you are trying to finally shed your puppy fat, as her grandmother calls it, before senior year. Some people ask for two rolls, and sometimes the ladies give out two without being asked, especially to well-known student athletes, like Blake.
“My homework is already done,” she added, hazarding a glance at her mother.
Through a sigh, her mother said slowly, “Be back by nine.”
She forked another bite of lean, flavorless chicken and then boldly said, “Well, the peak of the shower is closer to ten-thirty. And curfew for minors is actually eleven, so…”
“Fine,” her father said and she had to steel herself from snapping her head up to check his face as he said it, from tipping the hand of her excitement. “Eleven.”
She carefully, astutely, did not mention Blake’s hot tub at any point in this conversation.
She is good at making persuasive arguments, or so her English teachers have always claimed. She is regularly praised in red ink for her authority and maturity.
Charles picked her up from her own driveway twenty minutes ago, that’s how far into the cornfields Blake’s house is located. The snow here is powdered glitter, pristinely white, so cold it has crystallized into the sparkling air. It squeaks like styrofoam under her boots when she steps out of Charles’s dusty sedan. The night is sharp, knife-edged, and she is shivering with the awareness that she has never been to this house before, that Blake is not even a friend of hers, not really—she was just in the right place at the right time for this invitation.
Blake’s house is grand but austere, an old farmhouse that rears up like a brick-and-shingle butte on the snowy plain. She sees it has a satellite dish and a wraparound porch, and while she cannot see it yet, she knows somewhere there is also the hot tub, which Blake calls a spa bath. The only other thing she knows about the house is that somewhere within it is a nude photograph of Blake’s mother. She doesn’t know anyone who has actually seen this photo, but everyone knows it is there. She doesn’t know what it might do to a person to grow up with a nude photograph of their mother in their house.
Charles does not ring the bell or even knock. He just lets himself in through the front door with the same proprietary ease he has in the yearbook room. And just as she does there, she follows him like a shadow. The house is bright and warm, and even before she slips her boots off onto the mat, she finds herself searching the walls for the photograph, her heart clanging. Instead, she sees large, dark-hued paintings of familiar landscapes. Empty fields studded with poplar stands and winter wheat—the same kind they passed in the car.
Charles calls down the hallway, “We’re here!” So loud, she thinks, should they be so loud? But his voice is absorbed into the whitewashed plaster and dark-stained trim, the ornate rugs covering the floors, the enormous leather sofa next to—she has to look twice—a stuffed porcupine. Blake’s parents are doctors. Her father is also a doctor, they are all colleagues at the large clinic that makes their otherwise rural town noteworthy. But she wonders now what kind of people Blake’s parents are.
Blake bounds into the entryway in a cloud of aftershave and toothpaste smells. He allegedly has younger brothers to go with those doctor parents, but any other family members who might be home remain invisible as he pulls them swiftly down the hall, into his bedroom.
Blake is delighted to see them. Charles, of course, because they are good friends. Lanky and studious in his threadbare, shrunken sweaters, Charles is the editor of the yearbook, and Blake works on the sports pages. She covers clubs—that’s how she knows Blake. Charles and Blake know each other differently, more deeply. She’s not sure how. They speak to each other in a ratatat shorthand of movie quotes and in-jokes that she loves to listen to, loves to absorb when they are all working in the yearbook room together during fifth period, but it is a language she cannot really understand, like how she felt when she covered the Latin club’s dramatic scenes for an article. Charles and Blake are a nation of two, while she is at best a distant ally.
Blake is tall and broad, a two-season athlete. He has dark eyelashes and a mouth that smiles more on one side than the other, and he once bumped into her in the doorway to the yearbook room and had to put his hands on her arms to steady her, and she has never quite forgotten the pressure of his fingers against her biceps, his thumbs brushing the ticklish undersides of her arms. He has the dark, liquid eyes of a deer. When she watches him talk to Charles, when she stares at his lopsided lips, she sometimes feels possessed by an urge to press her face against his, to feel his eyelashes whisper against her cheeks, to match her breaths to his. And now, here she is, sitting on his bed, in his half-darkened bedroom, and she can see that his sheets are navy and dark green plaid, and his laundry is overflowing from a tall-sided linen basket, and he is glad to see her too.
A hulking desktop computer dominates one side of his room—a luxury she feels she can’t even fully take in, and she doesn’t want to stare. A blocky, winged toaster bounces around its screen until Blake pulls up an article on CD-ROM about the meteor shower. As he and Charles debate the right moment to go outside, the acceptable ratio of falling stars to degrees below zero, her attention wanders shyly over the walls, where Blake has tacked up movie posters, woven scarves for what she thinks might be a soccer team from another country, black and white photographs of friends. Charles is in several, always in close-up, always looking away from the camera. She feels like she is not only sitting inside Blake’s room, but within some code of his thoughts, or feelings. She’s never thought of his feelings before.
“Do your parents know I’m here?” she asks, staring at the closed door, straining to hear any signs of life beyond it.
“Yes,” Blake snorts. “My mom insisted on it. Three’s a good crowd, she said.”
His mom? His nude mother wants her here? She feels a little dizzy.
“You have your suit?” he asks her.
She runs a thumb under one strap, pulling the swimsuit out from the collar of her sweater so he can see the black lycra before it snaps back into place.
“Same,” Charles says, without demonstrating.
“Well, well,” Blake says, and does something with his eyebrows that nearly levitates her right off his bed. “Let’s go, then.”
She feels like she is not only sitting inside Blake’s room, but within some code of his thoughts, or feelings. She’s never thought of his feelings before.
She wonders if this is just a typical Thursday night for Blake. There is a canvas tote full of towels and blankets next to the sliding patio doors, ready for the deck and tub beyond. Maybe this family is just deeply at ease in their own collective skin? Maybe they all take a spa bath every night, shocking themselves with alternating heat and cold to build character in some sort of ritual celebration of their Scandinavian heritage? Maybe Blake’s are the kind of parents who are loose and free and buy their son a Playboy subscription to encourage his budding sensuality? She’s heard of such things. She sees a metal flask glinting within the tote. She isn’t sure if she should notice it, and doesn’t want to get too excited about what it might contain, so she pretends she doesn’t see it at all. She just shivers in her swimsuit at the crack in the sliding patio doors, blocking the cold from going into the house with the front of her body, absorbing the warmth from the family room with her back, as Blake and Charles pull the thick foam cover off the hot tub. They are momentarily lost behind a wall of steam.
They lower themselves gingerly into the water. She watches the air freezing into a misty aura around their bodies as the hot water seethes over their toes, their calves, their torsos, the soft thumbprint of Charles’s belly button, the tight rosette of Blake’s, wreathed with dark, brambly hair. When she darts out of the house to join them, they have disappeared up to their shoulders. The water slops around her stocky body as she tucks herself into it. Her skin pinks and prunes under the roiling surface as her hair slowly freezes above it. Charles and Blake seem utterly at ease leaning against the sides of the tub, bodies buoyed by the water and jets, knees knocking gently into each other, and her, from time to time. Her muscles loosen slowly, almost imperceptibly as they sit, but she cannot relax.
She studies their bodies shimmering under the water. They look like porpoises. Like heat mirages. In the shifting upward flow of the bubbles, they are by turns sleek and sexless as children, and then chiseled as if from quartz, all shining planes. She can’t stare too much or they’ll notice, though they are watching the meteor shower overhead, not her, which gives her more leeway to watch them. She longs for them. She burns for them. She is here with them, amazingly, so close to them, separated by just a few thin layers of synthetic fabric. She wants so badly for them—either of them, both of them, she is not picky!—to notice anything about her beyond her keen copyediting abilities. She regularly indulges in involved, lengthy fantasies about them—often Blake, but sometimes Charles, sometimes both of them at once—kissing her, undressing her, running a hand down her naked body and whispering against her neck. She embroiders these details over and over in her mind: what she might wear, where this illicit touching might take place, what their fingertips and lips and throats might feel like against her own. But she cannot quite imagine what might happen beyond that moment of first contact. Surely they would know what to do, would be better at touching her than she is at touching herself? Whatever they wanted to do to her, she knows she would submit to it.
She has tried so hard, this year. Carefully explained the haircut she wanted to the stylists at the only salon in town; taken the full-length mirror from the upstairs hallway and installed it (with permission) on the back of her bedroom door so as to practice flouncing and pouting in the privacy of her room. But these boys never seem to see what she wants them to see. And yet, here she is. Here is the miracle of this night in the spa bath. Her body is illuminated by the lights embedded in the tub, glowing in a color palette she associates with swimming pools and spring break, and she also feels herself glowing. She is floating like an egg, and some core of excitement deep under her belly is round and taut and full of gold.
They look like porpoises. Like heat mirages. In the shifting upward flow of the bubbles, they are by turns sleek and sexless as children, and then chiseled as if from quartz, all shining planes.
The sky is so full of stars. Not the marquee twinkles she can sometimes see from her bedroom window at night, the Big Dipper, Orion. This is a spray with depth and variation. There is no moon, and beyond the deck the lawn and then the fields stretch into a pale void, not white, but not dark either. The first shooting stars are like needles briefly laid against the blackness of the sky. Once they start, they keep falling and falling, hours of stars. They are impossible to count—almost impossible to see. They seem more obvious, more solid somehow, when she isn’t looking directly at them. Charles says this has something to do with the cells of the eye, rods and cones, and then she cannot stop thinking of rods and cones, rods and cones. Rods when she looks over at them in their billowing swim trunks and cones when she looks down at herself. She is blushing, and looking away, and seeing the stars fall almost by accident.
At some unspoken signal, Charles and Blake rise out of the water and spring to the deck to grab towels and blankets, any barrier they can find to keep the sting of the air at bay. She sloshes up as well, but before she can haul herself up over the lip of the tub, Blake is stopping her.
“Where are your boots?”
She left them back by the front door.
“No, no, your feet will freeze to the deck without boots. Hang on, I’ll go get them for you.”
He disappears into the house with Charles, and she is left, jaw tightening, alone, half-submerged in the roiling water. She lowers herself back into the bubbles and stares at the quiet house, its curtains drawn like the closed eyes of a corpse. Nothing moves, nothing happens. The house is a still-life now, and she must look away.
She is staring out over the empty fields when she sees the meteor. It is enormous, nothing like the white filaments they have been tracking all this time. Brilliantly teal, like a Hollywood special effect. It slides across the heavens like a roadside flare from another dimension, falling down instead of up, green-blue instead of red, smooth and smudged instead of sparkling. She has seen the northern lights before. When they first moved to this town, her father woke her up one night in early winter, carried her out into the front yard as if she were an infant, and pointed up to the murmuration of light dancing over their heads. The memory of that glowing curtain of pink and green has always felt otherworldly—while she is sure it happened, it retains the quality of a dream. That shifting brightness, viewed from her father’s arms, cannot compare to this glowing seam in the sky. The star falls and falls for what seems like minutes, finally devoured by a distant fringe of trees on the horizon, though she is certain there must be an impact she will hear or feel at any moment, sound and vibration speeding back to her across the empty, frozen fields.
“Maisie!” Charles is shouting at her from the doorway. “What are you doing!”
She is standing in the middle of the tub, frost growing on her limbs, her chest and thighs steaming.
They run to her with rosy cheeks and mussed hair, robes and blankets flapping salaciously as they each take one of her arms and lift her straight out of the water, so easily, like they’re moving an awkwardly placed chair.
“Did you see it?” she asks them. “Just now?”
They wrap her in two towels, one around her shoulders and one tucked around her waist, and Charles is holding her tight while Blake turns to get something from the bench. Her teeth are clenched against the aching cold, but her heart soars beneath the numbness of her chest and she can almost hear the throbbing song of blood running through her body. Blake turns back to her with the flask in his hand, and she leans back into Charles as she lifts her face up to Blake, her lips parting. This is it, she thinks. She has been bathed in magical, otherworldly light, anointed by starfall, and now they can finally see her, and Blake is dropping to his knees, kneeling before her as if she is some kind of queen.
When they first moved to this town, her father woke her up one night in early winter, carried her out into the front yard as if she were an infant, and pointed up to the murmuration of light dancing over their heads.
He is pouring something hot from the flask onto her toes, which have, in fact, frozen to the deck.
“I’m sorry, I looked, but I couldn’t find your boots. I didn’t see them inside. We didn’t—I didn’t mean to be in there for more than minute,” he is mumbling, shaking out the last warm drops.
Her toes are free. Her heart is frozen. Charles tugs her toward the house, and then, when she doesn’t move, lifts her right off her feet, scooping one arm under her legs in a way that makes her feel like a survivor of some calamity, the last person rescued from a house on fire.
They settle her onto the couch and pile blankets on top of her.
“What were you looking at?” they ask. “What did you see?”
She tries to describe it. The color. The flooding field of its light. She talks and talks so she doesn’t have to think about her exit from the spa bath. Doesn’t have to think about whatever she thought was happening.
“What color?” they ask her, incredulous.
Every shooting star they have seen has been white. A thread against a velvet sky. A scratch in the vinyl. She reaches back to long afternoons coloring by herself in her childhood bedroom. It was sea foam. Robin’s egg. Aquamarine. She can see they don’t believe her. She shakes her head and the stiff locks of her icy hair lean angrily away from her skull.
“You looked like a Valkyrie out there,” Blake tells her. The lower-level English classes have been reading mythology this quarter. She isn’t sure how to tell him that despite being in the honors section, she isn’t quite sure what a Valkyrie is.
“Breastplate of ice. Your hair looked like a helmet!” Charles adds, even though he is in the honors section with her.
“All you needed was a spear. Or a sword,” Blake says.
She warms at the word breastplate, but their healing attention is fleeting. They are soon laughing about her meteor; scatting about aliens, nuclear attack, the end of the world.
“I always thought the apocalypse would have more explosions,” Charles says.
“That reminds me—!” Blake leaps up from the couch to pull a movie box down from the bookcases that frame the widescreen television. He presses it into Charles’s hands and they are off in their own country again. They are not ignoring her exactly, but since they are not looking at her, she dares to brush a fingertip against her wet feet and then brings it to her lips.
Water. The flask was full of hot water.
“You should change,” Blake says, startling her. “Your lips are still blue. Like, navy.”
“Indigo,” Charles adds. “Cobalt.”
She considers this and stands, pushing the pile of blankets to the side, dropping the towel still wrapped tightly around her shoulders. “Where should I…” she says. She hesitates for just a moment, but then thinks of herself in a breastplate, sword in hand, taking what she wants. She begins to unwind the towel from her waist.
“You can use my parents’ room. Come on, I’ll show you,” Blake says, darting past her out of the room. Charles looks away as color flames back into her face.
She mutely grabs her backpack—which is right next to her boots, right where she left them both by the front door—and follows Blake up a hushed staircase. He knocks on a door, then opens it for her and hurries back down the stairs before she can say thank you, or anything else.
She leaves the door open several inches and pulls her clothes out of the bag. Since she left home with her swimsuit already under her clothes, her bra and underwear are wadded into the bottom of her schoolbag in a chilly little bundle, somehow unwarmed by their hours in the house. She lays them out with her sweater and jeans on the bed, which is as wide as a boat—wide enough for at least three people. She lets her remaining towel sop onto on the thick-piled carpet and catches her own reflection in three panes of a vanity mirror. Her lips really are blue. Purple, even. She looks sickly. She pinches her cheeks and rubs her knuckles against her lips, then peels the clinging swimsuit from her body and stands back to see herself. Even though she feels warmed, she is still covered in goosebumps, her arms and thighs peppered red and white, but she is not unlovely, she thinks. There is something if not beautiful, then, respectable about her tidy frame, her damp, dark locks. She could probably be appreciated, if not adored.
She hears something outside the room—not quite a noise, a shifting somewhere in the house, an exhalation—and remembers herself, whose room she is in. She shimmies quickly into her clothes, almost falls over pulling on a sock that sticks against her clammy toes. She combs her hair with her fingers, provoking a frizz of tangles. There are now angry red blotches on her cheeks, and her lips are chapped and raw. A little sob escapes from near her sternum, surprising her with both its volume and trailing emotional confusion. She sits at the vanity for several deep, steadying breaths. And then she sees it.
The photograph is small, much smaller than the image that had developed in her mind—a mere snapshot of a woman posed against a valley, as if she has just reached the summit of a mountain. It rests in a raw wood frame right here on the vanity top, next to a brush that needs to be cleaned of a nest of salt-and-pepper hairs. Without really thinking about what she is doing, she lifts the brush and draws it slowly through her own damp hair. The color in her cheeks is going down, she can see the change already in the mirror. She glances at the photograph as she carefully brushes the tangles from her hair, then sets down the brush and picks up the frame.
The woman’s face is turned to the camera, but her body is pointed away. The shot is candid, a fleeting glance back over her left shoulder. She is laughing, her mouth wide, eyes squinting nearly shut against a bright afternoon sun. The photo is faded, but Maisie can tell the woman is tan and healthy, easy in her surroundings. Her back is bare, all the way to the base of her spine, where a line of blue is visible just above the edge of the photograph. Her body is pointed away from the camera, but a soft curve of breast is intimated along her left side.
Blake’s mother. Nude in her hands. She brings her face even closer to the photograph. She sees something—just there, under the blond ponytail forever frozen mid-swing, something green, something small and angular. A strap, or a tie. And there, laid against that whisper of skin, that shadowy suggestion of bosom, a slim green line.
She sets the photograph back down. This woman is not nude. She is wearing a blue and green halter top. Yes, the photo is faded, and yes, her pose makes her unadorned skin a focal point of the frame, but the woman’s smile is clearly the photographer’s subject. Maisie stares into her own eyes in the mirror and tries to remember who first told her about this supposed nude photograph, and where they had heard about it; whether the root of the rumor was a boy, or a girl. Whether they’d have known what they were seeing. People only see what they want to see, she thinks.
She pads back down the stairs and returns to the foyer just as the boys emerge from Blake’s bedroom, where it appears they have been changing out of their swimsuits as well. They are flushed and glassy-looking, suppressing soft giggles. She wonders if they refilled the flask with something other than water. It is after eleven now and she makes a pleading look at Charles, though she also knows she would stay here all night if he chooses not to understand her. But he nods, and they all shrug back into their coats and scarves and hats, even Blake, who follows them out into the driveway.
“They’re still going,” he says, looking up at the sky.
They pause, all three of them in a line, chins up to the falling stars. She is in the front and her head knocks against Charles behind her, but he doesn’t move out of her way. He lets her lean lightly against him for a minute, for a few minutes more. Maisie’s hair is still wet, and she can feel it freezing again, solidifying in the brutal air, so cold it makes her cough when she dares to breathe, which breaks the spell. They break apart. Blake and Charles shake hands, a lingering forearm grasp she has never seen them exchange before, but that feels secret and masculine and very grown-up. Blake gives her a clumsy hug as well and mumbles a final goodnight over her shoulder to Charles.
Yes, the photo is faded, and yes, her pose makes her unadorned skin a focal point of the frame, but the woman’s smile is clearly the photographer’s subject.
She feels sleepy, and joyful, and disappointed in some way she cannot name. Once the car warms, she cannot keep her eyes open. Her head lolls. When Charles guides them to a lurching stop in her own driveway, her hair has frozen to the window. She plucks it free, marveling at the frost it leaves glittering on the glass in rigid lines, a map of an unknowable land.
“So what will you tell people? About tonight?” Charles asks, pronouncing his question carefully.
She shrugs. It has only been the most magical night of her entire life, that’s what she will tell people. And yet, still not as magical as she had hoped it would be. That’s what she would like to tell Charles. But how can she, without revealing what she had wished Blake’s unexpected invitation had promised for her? She has been alone, for hours, in a hot tub, with two boys and their two perfect bodies, and yet she has nothing to tell. No claim to either of them. She mumbles a simple thanks, and opens the car door, and then feels Charles’s hand on her arm.
“Maisie. They’ll never believe you,” he says.
His voice is warm, and his touch sends a thrill up her arm, but his eyes are wide and hard.
She thinks, what’s to believe? She thinks of the flask, the photo of Blake’s mother, the impossible blue-green torch of the falling star.
“Never,” says Charles, insisting on something she doesn’t understand.
“I know,” she says finally, because what else is there to say. “I know.”
STORY:
Andrea Cavedo has taught high school history and government for the last decade. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Chestnut Review, HAD, CRAFT Literary, and more. She lives just outside Chicago with her husband, two children, and a cat who is frequently in trouble. She can be found online at www.andreacavedo.com.
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ART:
Matthew Austin is an artist & designer from Maryland, he can be reached at www.matthewaustin.net.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Andrea about this story.
Just a soft, brief moment of heartbreak. Sorry Maisie, they're in love with each other. <3
I love the subtlety of this story and how naive the young woman feels. I could relate to her but understood the young men too. Such a great rendering of the difference experiences that teens have. Beautiful writing!